Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Attacks on the Free Press: How Dictatorships Begin

Numerous fact checking organizations have documented that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer on this blog, lies 76 to 80% of the time. Often the lies are gratuitous and one wonders why the issue addressed even merits mention much less lying about it. Others are far more sinister and it should be apparent to all except Der Trumpenführer's most extreme and/unthinking supporters that the man has an agenda: attack and destroy anything and anyone who sees through his lies or who diminishes his insatiable and delusional self-promotion. The goal? Much like that of Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels: destroy the free press and anything that can oppose their false narrative. Sadly, Fox News and Breitbart are only too happy to fuel the false narrative. Those that do not are now labeled "false news" as is every fact that undermines Der Trumpenführer's narcissistic view of himself or that calls into question his actions or self-enrichment. An op-ed at CNN looks at the severe danger posed as does a piece in the New Yorker. Here are highlights from CNN:

If
you watched President Trump's astonishing press
conference on Thursday, you might be forgiven for concluding
that the most urgent problem facing America is that the media "is out of
control." Some media "is fantastic," the president allowed. But
on the whole, journalism is plagued by "false, horrible, fake
reporting."

It's
clear that America's new President has chosen his new best enemy. Now that the
campaign is over and it's not very useful to drive the crowds into a frenzy of
hatred against Hillary Clinton, Trump has found the new direction in which to
focus his supporters' animosity. But this time, the anointed enemy serves an
even more useful purpose.

On
Friday, he made his point even more directly, tweeting "The FAKE NEWS
media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is
the enemy of the American people. SICK!"

The
advantages of having an enemy are well-known. In Orwell's dystopian novel
"1984" -- suddenly a new best-seller in the Trump era -- the masses
engage in a daily mandatory ritual, the "Two Minutes of Hate," during
which their anger is feverishly stoked against the foe of the moment.
Dictators, strongmen and autocrats have practiced the art of drumming up
loathing toward others to great effect.

Trump . . . . . knows that perceived enemies can help him fire up the
base, rally the crowds and shift responsibility. Don't look at me, this script
cries out; look over there, there is a threat, a danger, a foe.

When
it comes to enemies, a demonized media is even more useful than the average
antagonist.

Trump's
real nemesis is the truth. By attacking the media, he opens up a new line
of attack against facts, his true target. He is, after all, the Gaslighter in
Chief. He is trying to confuse the public so that they will not
believe inconvenient truths.

What he wants is to
manufacture his own pseudo-truth; to create a reality where he always wins.
Where the only polls that count are the ones where he's doing great. Where the
only comments about him are compliments, and where anything negative is false, the
work of an out-of-control media.

During Thursday's
press conference, Trump unleashed torrents of lies, distortions and
fabrications. When he said he won by the biggest Electoral College victory
since Ronald Reagan, it took a reporter to point out that the last three
presidents, Obama, Bush and Clinton, won by larger margins. He dismissed it all
with a flippant, "Well, I don't know, I was given that information."

As the scandal
surrounding his campaign's ties to Russia grows, Trump wants the public to think
it's all the doing of the dishonest media. But journalists are not letting up,
and the vast majority of Americans are not going to fall for Trump's tactics
for very long. Even on the generally-supportive Fox News channel, the braveShepard Smith called him out. "It's absolutely crazy," Smith said.
"He keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all
and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we're some kind of fools for
asking the question."

When
Trump says the people don't trust the media, he doesn't know that the media
outlets the people don't trust are the ones he likes -- and like him in return;
probably the ones he described as "fantastic."

Trump wants America
to think that it is the media that is out of control, because he wants to
control what people view as true and false. It seemed like a good plan, but it
has a fatal flaw. People are learning the difference between good journalism
and bad.

The piece in the New Yorker looks further at the issue and the history of past distortions of the truth that have lead to horrific results. Here are excerpts:

When the
leaders of the Bolshevik movement—Lenin, Stalin, and the rest—used the termvrag naroda,an “enemy of the people,” it was an ominous epithet that
encompassed a range of “wreckers” and “socially dangerous elements.” Enemies
included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, “rootless cosmopolitans,”
and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly
inevitable doom . . . . . To
be called an “enemy of the people” did not mean you had to hold oppositional
thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had
included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.

Robespierre, one of the architects of the Jacobin
Reign of Terror, set out to “horrify” the opposition, and his instruments were
the epithet, righteousness, and the blade.

In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik
seizure of power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published an essay inPravdacalled “Enemies of the People,” in which he lionized the
Jacobin Terror as “instructive.” His party, “the Jacobins of the twentieth
century,” he wrote, should follow suit, if not with the guillotine, then with
mass arrests of “the financial magnates and bigwigs.” Once in power, Lenin was
far more brutal than the revolutionary French.

Now, Donald Trump, the elected President
of the oldest democracy on earth, a real-estate brander and reality-T.V. star,
has taken not toPravdabut to his own preferred instrument
of autocratic pronouncement—the tweet—to declare the media “the enemy of the
American people.”

For months, cool, responsible heads have
been counselling hot, impulsive heads to avoid overreacting to Trump. We must
give him a chance. We must not in all our alarm compare him to all the tin-pot
dictators and bloody authoritarians who have disgraced history. . . . . we were assured that
everything was fine. He was simply fulfilling the agenda of his campaign. Calm
down. Don’t react to every tweet. Don’t take the bait.

Then came his press conference, last week
. . . . Trump instead took it upon himself to denounce repeatedly and at length
the sinful, dishonest press and the “very fake news” it produces. It was
unforgettable.

What Trump resembled at the lectern was an
old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the
Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chávez to
Erdoğan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten
the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a
more oppositional tone and role. “And then that paves the way for the
autocrat’s next move,” Simon told me. “Popular support for the media dwindles
and the leader starts instituting restrictions. It’s an old strategy.”

At the same time, there are distinct
signs that Trump is losing ground among members of the conservative media who
had initially cut him some slack, not least because they felt the liberal media
had been besotted by Barack Obama. The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts,
on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the
press have become too evident, too repulsive to be discounted as mere sideshow.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as in every
genuinely authoritarian state, there are no “enemies”—or, at least, none with
the capacity to challenge power. Calling on all the repressive means available
in such a state—compliant courts and legislatures; the elimination of political
competition; comprehensive censorship of television—soaring popularity ratings
are achieved. President Trump may wish for such means, just as he wishes for
such popularity. For all the chaos and resulting gloom these past weeks, it has
been heartening to see so many “enemies of the American people”—protesters, judges,
journalists, citizens of all kinds, even some members of Congress—do their work
despite Presidential denunciation, not necessarily as partisans of one party or
another but as adherents to a Constitution.

The resistance must continue and Trump must be driven from office, preferably after being found guilty of treason in such glaring terms that he and his agenda will be rejected by all but the most extreme racists, Christofascists and misogynists who have been the bedrock of his base. The man is unfit for office. Oh, and if we are lucky, Mike Pence will be implicated as well.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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